Motherhood enjambed: birth stories, ritual, and Implicit Religion

ABSTRACT This paper analyses how birth stories function ritually in the lives of the people who tell them, particularly in response to the way that birth uniquely challenges not only one’s sense of bodily boundaries and personal control, but also self-narrative coherency. Emplotting and organising one’s own birth experience in narrative form allows for the restoration of personal equilibrium and earnest exploration of paradoxical emotions and unmet expectations. I interrogate the definitions of ritual generally present in scholarship of pregnancy and birth, eventually arguing that the narration of birth stories can function as an implicit, world-repairing, reclamation ritual owned by the birthing person, themselves, following from Edward Bailey’s Implicit Religion.